The summer movie season is in full swing. A few screenings have already happened around the country, but there’s more in the coming weeks and months. Here’s the list that I’m aware of right now with links for more details and tickets:

We’ve got a brand new addition to the Journalism section today as Cameron chats with The Who’s Roger Daltrey in this 1974 interview from Circus Magazine. Roger certainly was prophetic and this is over 40 years ago! You can also see how his philosophy has rubbed off on bands with longevity such as Pearl Jam. Enjoy!

Roger Daltrey Tells Why The Who Will Never Break Up

A sleek 747 jetliner rose from the rain-drenched runway of the San Francisco International Airport and swung across the night sky towards Los Angeles. Roger Daltrey stared reflectively out the plane’s window at the flickering lights outlining the Bay area. Many hours earlier, at the Cow Palace, The Who played before the first American audience they had seen in years.

It was ten years since the mop-topped microphone twirling singer first established a raucous band of English mods known as the High Numbers. Included in this noisy band was a solemn bassist named John Entwistle, a clowning drummer named Keith Moon and a beak-nosed guitarist named Pete Townshend. After a minor hit with a single called “I’m The Face,” the group’s name was changed to The Who. The rest, from instrument smashing to Woodstock to Tommy, is—as they say—history.

“Ten years,” Roger said as he turned away from the window and sighed incredulously. “Ten years of this.” He paused for a moment to adjust the paraphernalia in the seat pouch before him. Still an energetic ball of fire, Roger Daltrey is far from a weathered old rock and roll conversation piece. Just like his fellow band members, Daltrey is a professional in every sense of the word. “I used to wonder,” he mused, “how The Who have been able to stay together this long. Now I know. We all know. Pete, Keith, John and I have learned to stick together when times are at their toughest. We learned that when things are tough it’s precisely the time to stay at your closest.”

Thanks for your patience as we had to move the site to a new server. We are back and aim to post more regularly. I found these two interesting pieces (Clothes on Film over at Interview magazine) that discuss both Dorthy’s dress from Jerry Maguire and Penny Lane’s coat from Almost Famous with costumer designer Betsy Heimann. Enjoy!

In Almost Famous [2000], William Miller (Patrick Fugit), a young music lover, lives out his dream of writing for Rolling Stone by becoming a rock tour roadie with the Band-Aides, and their number one fan, Penny Lane. The storyline was loosely based on director Cameron Crowe’s early life, as a teen reporter for Rolling Stone. Costume designer Betsy Heimann is the woman who translated his heady ’70s tour life into unforgettable garms—but most notably, the ingénue Penny Lane’s (Kate Hudson) iconic shearling coat. The lead character’s outfit resurfaced online in 2015 when it was discovered that the fur collar was made from a rug purchased at Urban Outfitters, a rather genius bit of DIY. However, Heimann revealed even more about what made this coat so memorable.

BETSY HEIMANN: We did a lot of research from when Cameron [Crowe] was on the road. We had two rock photographers who Cameron and I were friendly with, Neal Preston and Joel Bernstein, and they were the premiere rock ’n’ roll photographers in the ’70s, so that’s where we started with inspiration. As far as Penny Lane goes, she was this young girl who was laughing on the outside and crying on the inside. It had to be that when she put that coat on, that was her sanctuary, her cocoon. I wanted it to be something that she could wrap herself up in. And my inspiration for the shape was a 1920’s opera coat because it has a broader collar and a swingy bottom. When she goes up that ramp and she looks back to William, I wanted there to be some detail in the back, so I added some pleats. I just wanted it to be her safety blanket. The collar, I’m sure you’ve read somewhere, was a rug from Urban Outfitters that I cut up and it had to be the right color to bounce the light off of her face. I worked closely with John Toll, our cinematographer, to get it just the right shade, so when the light bounces off of her face and she looks so innocent and she looks like she believes in the happy ending, whereas inside she’s like, “Please let there be a happy ending.” You know?

In Jerry Maguire [1996], single mother Dorothy Boyd [Renee Zellweger] makes the bold decision to leave the stability of her full-time job to join Jerry [Tom Cruise] in starting his own sports management company, after a memo he sends to their entire staff gets him fired. At first, they have only one client and, when the pair get involved in a romantic relationship, things grow even more uncertain.

While filming his 1989 debut, Say Anything…, director Cameron Crowe found himself working with esteemed character actor John Mahoney. Mahoney, who died February 4th, 2018, was a formidable stage performer before portraying Jim Court, the divorced father of Diane (Iona Skye) who becomes embroiled in an IRS investigation while simultaneously trying to deter his daughter’s budding romance with Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack).

While the role ostensibly made Mahoney the film’s antagonist, Crowe tells Rolling Stone that the actor arrived on set “with a bounce in his step and a twinkle in his eye” and “brought joy to every scene and every take.” Most of all, the director remembered the actor’s brilliant laugh, which rang out long after they finished shooting one of the film’s most intense and emotional scenes.

John Mahoney came into our Say Anything… world with a bounce in his step and a twinkle in his eye. He had mighty Chicago cred too. He’d come from the esteemed Steppenwolf acting troupe, was already friends with John Cusack and had just performed in John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves on the Broadway stage. Mahoney brought joy to every scene and every take. The more dramatic and powerful the performance, the louder his unmistakable laugh as soon as I called “cut.”

You see, John Mahoney’s laugh wasn’t just a laugh. It was a two-note foghorn; a call to arms that said, “That’s right, when it’s good, it’s fun!” The biggest Mahoney laugh might have been when we shot the scene in which Lloyd (Cusack) visits Jim Court on the prison yard, bringing him a final letter from his daughter Diane (Ione Skye). The scene was fraught with tension. We discussed many different tonal versions, deciding on a quiet one. We stood out by the barbed prison fence. Action.

“How you doing?” Lloyd asks Jim Court, almost tenderly. Mahoney then used all the character frustration and love and pain he’d been building for the entire shoot of the movie and just yelled: “I’M INCARCERATED, LLOYD!” That moment and John Cusack’s reaction is one of those moments I’ll be forever grateful for. They sure made a young director feel good. And when the take was over, you know what happened. The Laugh. And it was loud.

A few months later, I ran into John Mahoney again. I was in my neighborhood McDonald’s and felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around. It was Mahoney. He saw the curious look on my face. This consummate actor, born for the stage, just standing waiting for a Big Mac. The laugh was unforgettable. With skill and hilarity and soul and pain and a dash of mystery, John Mahoney always did make unforgettable look easy. I hope this made you laugh, John, wherever you are, feeling all this love from so many. Bravo, my friend.

Happy Friday. We dug this out of the archives today as one last tribute to Walter Becker and Steely Dan. This short piece is from the February, 1973 issue of Zoo World as the band reflects on their new found success with their first hit single, “Do It Again” of their new record, Can’t Buy A Thrill.

Steely Dan

“Well, I imagine you’ve seen it,” Steely Dan manager Gary McPike sighed as he withdrew a well-fingered, almost crumbling, clipping from that morning’s Los Angeles Times.

It was a critical review of the band’s recent appearance at the Whiskey. A quick scan revealed it wasn’t as crippling a write-up as the concerned McPike’s attitude may have implied. The music was fantastic, contended the reviewer, but the band’s drab attire was inexcusable. This lack of showmanship, concluded the piece, revealed an inherent disregard for the audience.

“I like movement,” remarked Wait Becker, the group’s bassist and one half of their composing team, “and I’m all for the visual side of rock ’n roll, but the music is the most important thing. When the visual aspect gets in the way of the music. I’d rather forsake it.”

It’s not as if Steely Dan hides behind their sound equipment while performing their set, however. Lead singer, David Palmer, performs as spirited a set as anybody else, and the rest of the band does their share of bopping as well, but some people you just can’t please.

“As far as that one review is concerned,” added Donald Fagen, organist, sometime lead-vocalist, and the other half of the aforementioned writing duo, “I think the person who wrote it has an unusually high interest in men’s fashions.” Fagen pauses a moment to laugh, then continues, “I mean if a person is that disinterested in the music, I’d just as soon they go elsewhere.”

Steely Dan is a new band. Emerging out of the ruins of several other bands that barely missed making it or just plain never did, (their present line-up (Jeff Baxter on guitar, Jim Hodder on drums, Becker on bass, Fagen on keyboards and Palmer on vocals) was settled upon as recently as last August. Their first dose of recognition came with an irresistible single by the name of “Do It Again.” Steely Dan passed that first hurdle on their way to large scale success, which was a new experience for the former members of Jay And The Americans and Ultimate Spinach. So Steely Dan has reached a position in four months, most bands can’t reach in years.

Perhaps most responsible for the group’s following is the extremely accessible composing talents of Becker. Do It Again, according to the writers, was not intended to be a single. “In fact,” Faqen-one of your more obvious New Yorkers – continues, “we didn’t try to record or write any of our tunes catering to any particular market. But, as it turns out. I guess we’re just naturally commercial.”

Can’t Buy A Thrill, Steely Dan’s impressive debut album, looks like it’ll produce several more hit 45’s before the band’s follow-up Lp hits the stands in a couple months. But, the question appears to be, does the group intend to be a singles band or an albums band.

“Both…I hope,” Becker responds. “We try to make every cut as good as we can, not really thinking whether it’s adaptable to AM or not.”

Needless to say, things have not always been on the up-and-up for the Becker-Fagen team. Writing together long before their involvement in Steely Dan, the two kept themselves alive for two years by playing in Jay And The Americans’ back-up band.

“We worked about two weekends a month on that job,” remembers Becker. “That paid the rent. The rest of the time we just hung out, wrote songs and threw them out the window. Our publishing company was actually non-existent, and we ended up writing songs for other people who never did them. We wrote some songs for Barbra Streisand…she actually did one of them, “I Mean To Shine.” It’s on her Barbra Streisand album. “We wrote songs for Dusty Springfield. I don’t think she ever got to hear them. Then we wrote some non-pop songs that no one got to hear.”

“Denny Doherty recorded one of our songs,” Fagen mutters, “but the album it was on never got released. His contract had ended.”

From there the two migrated down to Los Angeles from New York, where they met the other future members of Steely Dan, formed the band and began work on Can’t Buy A Thrill.

With the fickleness of the record industry and it’s audience being what it is, how does it feel, you may be wondering, to be in the depths of frustration one day and be topping the charts and accepting superlative praise the next. How does it change an artist’s life? Donald Fagen and Walter Becker can only speak for themselves.

“Well,” begins Fagen, “I used to have a lot more leisure time…like all the time…”

Sad day today as we’ve lost another great musician and human. Our best to Walter’s family, Donald Fagen and the Steely Dan community. They were, in their own particular and wickedly subversive way, the Coen Brothers of Rock. Here is Cameron’s ’77 story about Steely Dan.

Steely Dan Springs Back: The Second Coming

Their new album, held throughout product-glutted summer for just the right moment, accidentally came out the same afternoon as the new Rolling Stones LP. Their first tour in three years was canceled. They haven’t had a hit single since 1974’s “Rikki Don’t Lost That Number.” And still, their sixth and most esoteric effort yet, Aja, is one of the season’s hottest albums and by far Steely Dan’s fastest-selling ever. Suddenly, against all the odds, it’s Steely Dan fever.

They are the unlikeliest super-group – perhaps because there is no group. Two blurry character named Walter Becker and Donald Fagen write and construct the songs, then hire highly skilled studio musicians to execute the parts. They even play themselves, but less and less, it seems, each album. (“It wouldn’t bother me at all,” says Becker, “not to play on my own album.”) The infrequent product of their labors is labeled a Steely Dan album. Any further details are subject to Becker’s and Fagen’s notorious distaste for facts.